In the Beginning Was Information (29 page)

Peter Dommel, one of the Wycliffe missionaries, reported that the Kaureh tribe in Irian Jaya uses only three different numerals, namely one, two, and many. To express "three," they say "one and two," and in the same way "four" is "two and two." Only in recent years have numerals, borrowed from Indonesian, been introduced to indicate "large" numbers.

It should be clear from these examples that no two languages correspond fully in respect to word meanings, and they do not at all correspond where grammatical and semantic structures are concerned. Every language has its own unique wealth, its own special complexity, and also its own weaknesses.

A2.1.3 The Origin of Languages

There is a practically limitless number of speculations and theories about the origin of human languages [C1]. According to the natural sounds and imitation theory, humans mimicked the sounds made by animals. Although human languages contain many imitation words, such mimicry of animal sounds cannot be employed for a systematic analysis, because imitations vary quite arbitrarily from nation to nation. When a German cock crows, it cries "kikeriki," for example, an English cock crows "cock-a-doodle-doo," while Russians reproduce this sound as "kukuriki." An Eskimo can convincingly imitate the call of a whale, but it does not occur to him to name a whale by this sound.

Other theories maintain that human languages were derived from emotional exclamations, or that the first words were sounds used to accompany or emphasize certain gesticulations. The evolutionary idea of an upward development of grunts and snorts to cultural languages through the primitive languages of aboriginal nations has been thoroughly refuted by comparative linguistics. Even the different and separated Amerindian tribes in California possessed an extremely complex and subtle language. It was practically impossible to unlock this language grammatically and translate it adequately. The most complex Amerindian language of all is Comanche [C1]. Some sounds are whispered and others have to be formed by using only the larynx. During the First World War this language was used as a secret code [U1]. Two Comanche Indians were employed for telephone messages, one at each end. At the transmitting end, one of them translated the English message into Comanche, and these messages could not be deciphered, because the grammar was too far removed from European languages, and it would have taken several years of intensive study for the opposing side to have learned the language.

Such "code talkers" were employed during the Second World War as well, having been selected from different tribes (e.g., Comanche, Chippewa, Hopi, and Navajo), and the American Marine Corps employed 375 Navajos [U1]. The first four verses of the Gospel of John might serve to convey the complexity of this language:

1 Hodeeyáadi Saad jílí, Saad éí Diyin God bil hojíló, índa Saad éí Diyin God jílí. 2 T’ áá éí hodeeyáadi Diyin God bil hojíló; 3 éí t’áá’altsoní ájiilaa, índa dahólonígíí t’áálá’í ndi t’áá hádingo t’áadoo la’ályaa da. 4 Iiná hwii’ hóló, áko éí iinánígíí nihokáá’dine’é bá bee adindíín.

Conclusion: All languages are unique and all perform their functions well. They comprise morphological, grammatical, and semantic complexities and structures which were not devised by any person. The members of aboriginal tribes do not even realize that they use finely shaded categories. They also do not know the structure of their grammar, so that their language could not have been devised by their forebears.

Johann Peter Sübmilch established in 1756 that man could not have invented language without having the necessary intelligence, and also that intelligent thought in its turn depends on the previous existence of speech. The only solution to this paradox is that God must have given human beings language as a gift.

V. Fromkin and R. Rodman [F8] concluded that there was no proof for or against the divine origin of language, just as nobody can scientifically prove the existence or the non-existence of God.

In actual fact:
One cannot prove the existence of God, but He has revealed himself in creation in such a way that we can deduce His greatness and His wisdom (Ps. 19; Rom. 1:19–20). The same holds for the origin of languages. An evolutionary development can be precluded immediately, and it is clear from the complexity of all languages that behind and above the brilliant concepts figuring in all of them, there must be an originator of the ideas. We thus accept the biblical report that God gifted man with this special ability when he was created. The gift of speech is apparent from the following particulars:

– creation of the necessary special speech apparatus for articulation

– the ability to create words (Gen. 2:19)

– the ability to learn a language

– creative use of the language phenomenon

Originally, there was only one language (Gen. 11:1), but at the Babel judgment (Gen. 11:7) God caused many languages to arise, preserving the ability to express all thoughts in words. Using several examples, we have illustrated the complexity, and the special strengths and weaknesses of some languages.

At the moment, some 5,100 languages and dialects are spoken on earth. Many have become extinct, up to 3,000 during the past thousand years, and only about 100 languages are spoken by more than one million people each. Two-thirds of the entire world population employ only five languages: Mandarin Chinese, Hindustani, English, Russian, and Spanish.

A2.1.4 Written Languages

The invention of writing is one of the greatest intellectual achievements of man. (Perhaps Adam could have received the gift of writing together with the gift of speech. If so, writing was not "invented" by man.) Human memory does not last long and the storage capacity of the brain is limited, but this problem is overcome over distance as well as over time. Writing is essential for a people to develop literature, recorded history, and technology. Groups without writing therefore do not go beyond a certain stage in culture (e.g., aboriginal peoples). Only a written language allows the possibility of information storage, so that inventions and discoveries (e.g., in medicine and technology) will not be lost, but can be added to and developed further. Writing can thus be defined as follows:

Definition D6:
Writing is a human communication system set up by convention, which represents language as a sequence of symbols. These symbols should be able to be transmitted and received, must be mutually understood, and must represent spoken words. Writing reproduces spoken language in the form of symbols.

We can only speak of real writing when pictograms represent the spoken words of a given language through their shapes and sequences. The spoken word acquires a temporal dimension by means of writing; historical traditions usually require permanent records to be kept, and the same holds for science in most communities. Various nations invented their own writing technique — the Sumerians used pictograms about 3500 b.c., Egyptian hieroglyphics originated 3000 b.c., in the Middle East cuneiform writing was in use around 2500 b.c., and Chinese ideograms date from 1500 b.c. The latest and most important stage was however the invention of an alphabet. An alphabet consists of a predetermined number of written symbols, each of which represents one spoken sound only — at least in the ideal theoretical case. All these symbols can be used in arbitrary combinations to reproduce the different words of a language. When an alphabet is used, it means that the number of symbols is reduced to a rational minimum; its flexibility and the direct correspondence to the sounds of the spoken language has the effect that such writing makes it very much easier for anyone to learn and to use that particular language. Alphabetical writing originated around 2500 b.c. in the region of present-day Israel, Lebanon, and Syria. Today, only the following alphabets are in use: Hebrew, Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Georgian, Arabic, Persian, and Indian.

There are three kinds of writing systems:

1. Word based: Every symbol represents a word or a morpheme (e.g., Chinese).
   
2. Syllabic: Every symbol represents a syllable (e.g., Korean).
   
3. Alphabetic:  Every symbol generally represents a phoneme (e.g., English, Spanish).
   

If it is not necessary to represent a certain number of sounds, then the set of symbols can be reduced even more. In the case of the genetic code, the number of different symbols is a minimum because of the certainty of transmission; the same holds for binary codes and for Morse code.

A2.2 Special Languages Used in the Animal World

A language can be regarded as a system whereby certain sounds or gestures convey certain meanings. In this sense, many animals like birds, bees, crabs, wolves, and dolphins communicate with one another, but as far as fundamental characteristics are concerned, human language is vastly different from the communication systems employed by animals:

1. Creativity:
Only human language can be creative. When speaking, one can arbitrarily link together many lingual units to form well-constructed new sentences. Man is able to produce sentences which he has never before uttered, and he also can understand sentences which he has never beforehand heard. Any arbitrary matter can be verbalized. The communication systems used by animals are fixed and limited. The history of experiments with animals, purporting to teach them some complex language, is characterized by failure.

2. Voluntary conventions:
The vocabularies of all human languages all over the world consist predominantly of arbitrary vocal structures which correspond to the relevant concept or object purely by convention. In contrast, the sounds and gestures used in "animal languages" are inherently fixed, and can thus not be arbitrarily assigned some other meaning.

3. Comprehensiveness:
The number of thoughts that can be expressed in a human language is unlimited, but it is fixed and bounded in the animal world. The dance performed by bees is in principle such an effective communication system that numerous different messages could be conveyed, but in practice, the system, being restricted to a few concepts only, is inflexible.

4. Reason for transmission:
The messages sent by animals depend on certain stimuli (e g., fear, warning, desire to mate, and quest for food), but man is not limited to such strictures.

Although there are fundamental differences in quality between human languages and the communication systems of animals, the messages conveyed by the latter do qualify as "information." All five aspects of information as discussed above, are found here, as will now be illustrated by bee dancing.

Bee dances:
Bee dances, although simple, afford an illustrative example of the five aspects of information on the biological plane. The well-known Austrian zoologist Karl von Frisch (1886–1982) [F7] investigated and described this phenomenon to some depth. The general situation between sender and recipient is illustrated in Figure 39, as well as the syntactic, semantic, pragmatic, and apobetic levels. The transmitting bee, which has discovered a new and plentiful source of food on its latest flight, now passes this essential information (intentional communication) on to the other bees in the hive (the recipients). The employed signals are body movements. Although only a few bees are involved simultaneously, the code convention did not originate with the sender bee, nor with the recipients. This is a typical example of the situation depicted in Figure 24.

Figure 39: Bee dancing. This bee activity is a case of transmitting information; all aspects of information can be described precisely.

The syntax of the message is defined by various characteristics of the dance: namely the sequence of the motions, and the number of gyrations per time unit, as well as the direction of the straight line part of the movement. The attendant bees understand the meaning (semantics) of the specifically encoded information:

Distance of the food source:
If the distance is, say, 350 feet, the gyrations follow one another rapidly and the motions are fast. For greater distances, the movements become less rapid, but the straight-line part is emphasized and protracted. There is a nearly mathematical relationship between the distance of the food source in feet and the number of gyrations per minute.

The direction of the food source:
The direction of the straight part communicates the position of the food source in two ways, depending on whether the dancing is performed on a vertical wall of the hive, or on a horizontal plane such as the apron at the entrance. The sun is used as a compass.

The kind of flower:
Nectar-gathering bees communicate the kind of blossom by means of the odor clinging to the bee’s body and to the honey container. Another indispensable source of nourishment is pollen. When pollen is gathered, no nectar having an identifiable odor is carried, but some part of the blossom is brought back.